I Have Hurt and Rejected My Partner

I’m so adverse to disappointing anyone or the idea of us that...

“I’m sorry for all that’s happened to your life since we met.”

We were celebrating Pumpkin Patch day.

The day that my (now) husband - even though I’ve hated using that word until recently - had his first chance or choice at becoming a papa.

In 2012, I took my daughters to a pumpkin patch in the valleys of Virginia and they met a man for the first time.

I knew how I felt about him, but if they had felt differently- I would have swiveled in an instant. So everything I allowed myself to feel was like a felt, velvet - soft and thin and careful. I kept an emotional distance the size of newly-3 and 6 year old female-identifying schmunkins between us; Curls and freckles and fidgeting souls, top to shoelace.

It was how much they fell in love with him, actually- the way they trusted him, held his hand, pulled and pushed at him like taffy - that made me fall in love in a way that meant more than any love I’d known before. I’m not sure how I would have fallen had it not been for Follin (that sentence just reads too good), and - most of all, then - her very vocal older sister. Whatever she said… went.

And so, my heart went with him more and more and more.

Since then, however, much of our life has been living hell. There is just no other way to say it.

“Did you know when you met them then, that you’d be their Dad? That you’d still be with me now?” I asked at the pumpkin patch, now- a day I was concerned about following through on but that was still a momentous moment in the timeline of them, no matter what turns our life has taken. That’s not something I can take away or erase just because my final curtsy hasn’t been perfect; no internal standing ovation

“I don’t remember life that way,” he replied honestly (and annoyingly, as I’d rather have had a canned response, “You know that. But … well…”

He paused.

“Yes,” he said distinctly. “You already know that I drove home from your and I’s first date and called my best friend and said, ‘I just met the person I want to marry.’ So… yes. I knew there was no going backwards. I knew I was all in.”

And he always has been.

What many don’t know, when they look at a family outside-in or Inside Out- is that there is often one person in every pair who is the Roberts to the Gere; The one who’s ready to run from any source of conflict or imperfection. That, it might not be surprising by now to guess (if we can assume ourselves so familiar), is me.

I’ve been so hurt in our past, and I’m so adverse to disappointing anyone or the idea of us myself, that I will consider any tension as a reason to step aside.

I didn’t want our daughters to ever go through anything like their childhood again, and - even though Follin doesn’t remember a time without her Papa as her father - I never fully relax into the idea that something doesn’t have to be “ever after” to still be working towards happily.

It’ll never reach happy.

But I never got that memo, somehow, as a rejection recluse, growing up.

So, even though I feel almost no one wants to say something like this, this candidly, in their writing sometimes (or admit it in general because the only light it paints on one half of the party is not a dappled one), I have a very truthful confession I can make, without flinching, knowing that it might help someone else to know that you can be a Roberts and still not run:

I have hurt and rejected my partner more times than you can possibly imagine.

If we have even a healthy amount of argument over a normal topic (not saying we don’t have the worse iteration to that sometimes too, of course), I want to protect and cut-out before we get stabbed. I want to hide and go straight to the ‘conscious uncoupling’ I never got to do, though I would have been somewhat good at that Goop; I want to be civil and peaceful and past it.

And so, instead of getting into the work:

I wound.

PART ONE.

More on Thursday!